The point is that it is much easier to have a large impact with long-term basic research in a company that has a very large, profitable, and diverse business.
In practice, that means large companies that are sufficiently well established to not have to worry about short-term
@ylecun
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Long-term Research Impact in Large Established Companies
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FAIR’s Scientific Breakthroughs and Open-Source Impact
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You seem extremely misinformed.
FAIR has *simultaneously* produced scientific breakthroughs, insanely popular open-source packages, libraries, and platforms (e.g. PyTorch), *and* had an *enormous* impact on the company.
Lots of technologies originally developed at FAIR made their -
ConvNets Early Debates: Computer Vision Community’s Intellectual Journey
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Haha!
It wasn't quite like that.
Many senior members of the CV community were actually very friendly and curious about ConvNets (if skeptical).
There was a true intellectual debate.
Everyone had to have a "theory" of how vision worked.
For me, it was end-to-end gradient-based -
FAIR Research Impact Versus AT&T Bell Labs Legacy
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In many ways, FAIR is *better* than AT&T Bell Labs.
It was quasi impossible to open source code at AT&T.
and it's way easier for research to have an impact on product at Meta than it was at AT&T, where the leadership had no technical vision nor competence. -
Research in Startups: Publishing vs Revenue Pressures
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No. You can not possibly do research in a startup.
You might do it for a little bit of time. But you often won't publish.
But then, you run out of money and have to quickly develop products that generate revenue. -
Open Research in Industry Labs: Path to Academia
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The number of industry labs that practice open research and encourage scientists to publish can be counted on the finger of one hand (if that).
FAIR is famous for that.
This allows scientists to transition to a position in academia if they so decide at some point in their career. -
FAIR Researchers Career Transitions: Faculty Positions and Hirings
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I haven't kept a list.
it's quite a few, mostly in the last 2 or 3 years because FAIR is still young.
Also, many have done the opposite: quitting a tenure faculty position to come to FAIR.
Lots of folks have accepted junior faculty positions and delayed the start to spend a year -
Anthropic Founded by OpenAI Researchers After For-Profit Pivot
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Really?
I mean, Anthropic was founded by people who left OpenAI.
Quite a few research-oriented people left OpenAI when it pivoted to a for-profit development outfit funded by Microsoft. -
ML Researchers Transition from AT&T Industry to Academia
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Ok, here is a list of ML researchers from AT&T who moved academia: Michael Kearns, Dan Lee, Sebastian Seung, Fernando Pereira, Yoshua Bengio, Sara Solla, Rich Sutton, Satinder Singh, Peter Stone, Lawrence Saul, Rob Schapire,… and me. You can totally do it *if* you are in a lab